It started on a blog. In 2005, Panic! at the Disco recorded their first-ever demos on Garage Band, and teen guitarist Ryan Ross posted them on Fall Out Boy’s LiveJournal with the intention of bringing his band’s music to a larger audience. But Ross got the attention of none other than Pete Wentz, pop punk’s de facto leader at the time. As emo legend has it, the FOB bassist was so impressed with Ross, lead singer Brendon Urie, drummer Spencer Smith, and bassist Brent Wilson that he made his way to their practice space in Vegas before offering them a record deal.
Wentz arrived to find four lanky teen boys who had never performed live and could barely sync their computer-created beats to their thrashing guitars. But it didn’t matter — he saw the bones of a great record. “It was kind of a mess,” Wentz told Rolling Stone in 2007. “But I could see something… this little glimmering spot. As far as hooks go, everything they write gets stuck in your head.”
That’s how the seed was planted for Panic! At the Disco’s debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. Armed with a Decaydance record deal, a newbie producer in Matt Squire, and $10,000, the Vegas teens set out to shake up the emo scene.
With A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, Panic! at the Disco did exactly that and more. What started on a laptop and online blogs made a splash in the real world. The album peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, spawned their inescapable hit song “I Write Sins, Not Tragedies,” and even helped the band take home the 2006 Video of the Year MTV VMA.
It’s been 20 years since those theatrical hooks implanted themselves in the general public’s consciousness — and Fever You Can’t Sweat Out remains an addictive listen. This fall, the band is headlining the emo nostalgia festival When We Were Young with the promise to play the LP in its entirety. Though no one is quite sure what the band’s lineup will be at the festival (Urie stopped performing under the name in 2023 and the other four core members left before that), fans are still stoked to hear such a unique album performed in full for the first time in years. That’s all thanks to Fever’s status as both a capsule of early aughts emo and a road map for the pop-leaning explosion that would go on to include artists like Gym Class Heroes and Cobra Starship.
Beyond Fever’s head-spinning commercial success, the band’s debut album was the most popular LP to come from the online MySpace era of pop-punk and emo music. It’s a project with a distinct, technological touch, from its promotion to its drum machines and tongue-in-cheek lyrics like “we’re just a wet dream for the Web zines.”
“The internet has become such a great tool for bands in so many ways, I mean we had almost five thousand friends on myspace before we had even played a show,” Ross told AbsolutePunk in 2005. Panic! at the Disco’s inexperience as performers at the time is a fact people and publications love to focus on. After all, it was an anomaly for a band to obtain a record deal without first cutting their teeth on a live local music circuit. But by not thinking of the aspect of live performances, Panic! at the Disco was limitless when it came to making A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
You can hear that freedom in the album’s amalgamation of influences. Panic! managed to mesh striking dance synths and electronic vocal edits against angsty guitar chugs on the first half of the album. Meanwhile, the second half folds in the aesthetics of Vegas strip cabarets with eerie melodies from movie scores like Danny Elfman’s Nightmare Before Christmas. Lyrically, they take from Wentz’s signature wordplay and Chuck Palahniuk’s novels to create their own hyper-specific dramas. All these distinct parts coalesced to make up the vast world of Fever — and, to be honest, it shouldn’t all work so well. But the fact that it is an album you can dance to and bemoan goddamned open doors adds to its charm.
It’s almost no surprise Panic! at the Disco was never able to write an album quite as successful or expansive as Fever ever again. They followed it up with the Beatles-inspired Pretty Odd before Ross and Smith left the band. Even Panic! at the Disco’s 2018 hit “High Hopes” can’t hold a candle to the combustive spectacle of Fever. It’s a lighting in a bottle moment that stands out in emo-pop history.
Fever‘s popularity even surprised the band members, who weren’t quite convinced by its power. “We didn’t expect this album to have any success,” Ross told RS in 2007. “I don’t really think it’s that good. It was more like our experiment for figuring ourselves out.” In undergoing the complex journey of self-exploration, Panic! at the Disco unlocked an unprecedented type of freedom.
From Rolling Stone US
